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Category: Post Car Society

The German Tank Problem describes a method to statistically sample serial numbers of German WW2 tanks in order to estimate German War production capacity.

The Bloomberg Tesla Model 3 Tracker does use this method applied to vehicle identification numbers issued and observed to create upper and lower boundaries on the current weekly production rate for the Tesla Model 3.

Tom Randall has a Twitter thread on things that affect battery price for LiIon battery packs of electric cars. »If lithium prices quadruple, the cost of finished battery packs would only go up 1.6%, and the sticker price of an electric car will see almost no impact. Some people may get rich off metals in the meantime, but it’s not going to slow down the transition to electric cars.«

If there is one truth about the second half of the 20th Century it is that, by all accounts, we started moving out rather than up; horizontal rather than vertical. Not only through the process of suburbanization, the building of massive highways, and the rapid capital flight from cities, but also in how we designed everything from our homes to our workplaces.

We are going to build a lot of off-shore wind farms in the North Sea. These have often in deep water where fewer mussels and other animals live. The rotors have foundations, which essentially are forming a lot of shallower islands in the deep water, an artificial riff. This is good for mussels and other animals that like protection, shallower water and a solid base. Life in the sea is likely to become richer and more diverse.

English language video from the French Ministrère de la Transition écologique et solidaire, explaining how cyclists driving at red make crossings safer.

This video explains at length and through examples how allowing cyclists to pass crossings during red lights can make crossings a lot safer. I had this video in my G+ stream yesterday without a lot of explanation, mostly to see who actually watches it and how just runs the usual »Rowdy Cyclists Are Killing Us All« comments by reflex.

Tumblr of the Day is WTF Visualizations. It is also in Post-Car Society, because instead of useless graphics it shows a somewhat astonishing display of a graph of newly installed wind power generation vs. the percentage of vote for Clinton vs Trump. Nice correlation.